Great white sharks’ seal hunting strategy
The BBC have an article on the strategies that great whites use when hunting seals. The sharks identify a location, an anchor point, and then search the surrounding area for prey. Researchers found that this anchor point did not necessarily offer the best chance of intercepting prey, but did provide the optimal balance between finding it and catching it.
Apparently this suggests a premeditated hunting strategy akin to that used by human serial killers. The team of researchers did consult a specialist in geographically profiling criminal acts such as those committed by terrorists and serial killers. Such profiling is used to identify the criminals’ anchor points. But the researchers were using the profiling to analyse the attack patterns and identify location points, not to suggest that sharks are serial killers.
Personally I think the BBC have just taken the opportunity to play up the “sharks are serial killers” angle. In fact when I originally spotted the article yesterday the article title said something like “sharks use same tactics as serial killers” (I don’t remember the exact wording). It’s good to see they’ve now changed it to something less dramatic and more accurate. Sadly Yahoo (“Great white sharks hunt just like Hannibal Lecter“), Bloomberg (“Great White Sharks Said to Hunt Like Serial Killers“) and the LA Daily News (“Great white sharks: serial killers of the sea“), among others, have stayed with exaggeration and hyperbole.
As far as I can what the sharks are doing is adopting a sensible hunting strategy, to wait where you’ve got the best chance of catching what you want. Yes, you could argue that is the same thing that serial killers do. But it’s also what most of us do on a daily basis. If I want to catch a bus, I generally find that the best strategy is to wait at a bus stop. If I want to catch a train or an MTR, then waiting at a station tends to give best results. But sadly headlines such as “Great White Sharks use Same Strategy as Commuters” is presumably not sensational enough for journalists and editors. Instead they take the easy option and continue to villify sharks.
The above photo comes from Neil Hammerschlag and is shown on the BBC website, where you can read the article.
August 21st, 2009 at 5:21 pm
I enjoy watching the documentaries about sharks, in particular the large sharks. I cannot help but hope there is some monster shark in the depths as yet undiscovered.